According to a report in The Daily Caller citing an old news item, Democrat Phil Bredesen “once supported using taxpayer money to abort babies with Down syndrome.”
Records show that Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen has some skeletons in his closet concerning ties to Planned Parenthood and advocating for the public to fund Down syndrome abortions.
His comments about and position on abortion have come under scrutiny as he dukes it out with Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn ahead of the 2018 Senate race in Tennessee.
“I am opposed to federal funding of it [abortion], except in the case of danger to the life or medical health of the mother, rape, incest, or children with substantial development deformities such as Down’s syndrome,” Bredesen said in The Nashville Banner in 1987.
Bredesen has seemed to change his position on abortion depending on how the political winds are blowing at the time and he’s been labeled the “Duck and cover” candidate by the Tennessee GOP this tie around. But this new report may be hard for him to hide from.
The former governor has waffled on his abortion stance a number of times since then. Bredesen served as the governor of Tennessee from 2003 to 2011 and as the mayor of Nashville from 1991 to 1999.
“I am opposed to federal funding of it [abortion],” Bredesen said in a recently unearthed 1987 interview with the Nashville Banner, “except in the case of danger to the life or medical health of the mother, rape, incest, or children with substantial development deformities such as Down syndrome.”
The report continues:
… let’s be clear. What Bredesen called for absolutely fits the clinical definition of eugenics. He wants the government to subsidize the elimination of an entire group of people who happen to have third chromosomes and physical deformities that don’t prevent a happy, productive, and largely healthy life. But they are imperfect, and so the state should pay for their termination.
That sounds ugly, but it’s actually quite popular. Not long ago the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus, wrote about how she would have aborted her own children if she found out they had Down syndrome. “I would have grieved the loss and moved on,” she writes, because such children come with lower IQs and higher medical costs. She isn’t alone.
Thanks to prenatal screening, mothers can screen their unborn children for the disease and, if need be, snuff out the ones with Down syndrome. Many of them do. Something like two-thirds of women make that choice and decide to start over in the U.S. In Iceland, it’s almost universal.
Naturally, Planned Parenthood is solidly behind Bredesen’s camapign. Bredesen can try to run from his progressive record that led Senate Minority Leader Democrat Chuck Schumer to personally recruit. But he certainly can’t hide the truth in this media age.
Tennesseans, let's do this! #TNsen https://t.co/pcDxj1v5lW
— Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) April 5, 2018
